Word Wars

BY JON CHRISTENSEN

"We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare."
--W.B. Yeats

"Meditations in Times of Civil War"

"This is a war we're in. We're choosing up sides," thundered Gene Gustin, chairman of the public lands use advisory committee for Elko County, Nevada, at a "Win Back the West" rally a year ago. Shouts of approval rose from a crowd of 350 people, in cowboy hats and gimme caps, jammed into an old theater in Alturas, Calif., near the border with Nevada.

Looking back, Gustin's words now seem prophetic. A Forest Service ranger's home and office in Carson City and an IRS office in Reno were targets of bombings last year, although no one was hurt. Then there was Oklahoma City.

The war metaphor has laid siege to the Western imagination for at least a century, but it has overrun the West in recent years. Members of the wise use movement, ranchers, miners and loggers, accuse the Clinton administration and environmentalists of waging "war on the West."

Environmentalists have taken up the battle cry, accusing the wise use movement, industry and Congress of declaring "war on the environment." My head spins. There is so much talk of war in the West - and enough violent incidents - that many people worry whether real war is breaking out in the region.

Does violent talk lead to violence? How can it? How can it not? These questions can never be resolved. Violent acts are facts; violent talk is talk. The two often come together in stories, but, thank goodness, less often in reality.

Like many journalists, I have dreamed of being a war correspondent. But I never would have imagined I might get the opportunity so close to home.

I confess, I have used the war metaphor too. I have written about "range wars" and "water wars." But I worry that if war is what we want, we may get it. Lately, it has seemed that we are getting awfully close.

The history of the West is full of the barroom bravado captured in the phrase "to get Western." When things start getting Western it's time to stand up and fight or head for the door.

Cultural studies of the Western frontier, such as Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, and crime studies, such as Roger McGrath's Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes, a history of violence in mining towns, have shown that the stories of violence in have almost always been bigger than the real violence.

Nevertheless, the West is no different than most places. When violence seems the only way out, bullets will fly.

I take some consolation in the number of people who seem to be tiring of these word wars. When I talked to a group of eighth graders who had been brought to the rally in Alturas, Spencer Smith, a ranching kid from Surprise Valley in far northeastern California on the border with Nevada, told me he didn't think war was inevitable.

"I don't think it will go that far," he said.

"We don't want that," his friend Connor Nolan added. " I don't want to sit back while they annihilate our way of life. But I think if they look at it positively, we can too, and we can come up with a compromise. We need compromise and communication so you can work with them and they can work with you."

"We can live together in peace," said his classmate Tommy Harris, "but it will take time. We have to give up something."

"We'll all have to give up something," Connor added.

I was heartened to find that these kids could see through the rhetorical war that adults in their community were promoting. But I also glimpsed how slender their hopes were.

As a journalist, I know I have to report on the word wars in the West. But I also believe journalists need to get beyond the rhetoric to get the real stories.

I believe we all have a responsibility to tell true stories about how the West is changing. Our job is nothing less than telling our own story. That goes for environmentalists, wise users, and those of us caught in the middle in the West.

Out of the changes we're living through, we may find and create new myths and metaphors, new stories to live by. But if we do not find ways to talk about and understand changes, we could find ourselves at war over the wrong stories.